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It's red.
Shepard's holding on for dear life as the shuttle swerves and turns, throwing her into the walls and her teammates, but she still gets a chance to look out the window, even if briefly.
She's heard that Palaven was silver. Green and silver, if she's going by Garrus's words. Green horizons under the silver moons. And the pictures she saw, however few, were always of lush forests or inhospitable rocky deserts. Green trees and silver mountains.
The planet she's looking at is red. Bathed in hellfire, an orange-red flame of pure destruction that leaves her heart aching and her legs weak. A part of her is almost surprised she can't hear the screams of the tortured souls burning in that flame. Surely this kind of suffering can't just be extinguished by the overwhelming silence of space. Surely this is too huge to just fade out like that. How much destruction does it take for an entire planet to burn, so much that it's visible from outer space?
Her heart just about jumps up to her throat as a painfully sharp thought shoots through her head.
Garrus.
It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together and realise that the odds are he's dead. She saw what the Reapers were doing on Earth, and she knows that Palaven was hit even harder. The planet is burning right in front of her eyes. How many have died? How many are dying right now as she wonders about it? And why can she only focus on one person among those millions?
She tries to calm herself, chase those thoughts of him away. She's here for a reason. She needs to find Primarch Fedorian and secure the turian support Earth needs so badly right now. She can't afford to mix her personal feelings into this mission. This is too important. Besides — and she adds this part only for her own benefit, fully aware it's just empty reassurance — Garrus is smart, not to mention one of the best fighters she's ever met. He knew the Reapers were coming. Chances are he was prepared for it.
Though, she thinks as she looks out the window at the burning planet below them, does being prepared really change anything against this kind of firepower? The Protheans had probably been prepared too. In the end, survival against the Reapers comes down to sheer luck.
And Garrus has never been a very lucky guy.
She has to consciously shake off those thoughts. She can't think about him now. She can't allow herself to become compromised during this mission, and she's fully aware that Garrus is her weak spot.
Shepard curses herself; calls herself a fool in every language she knows. She can't have weak spots right now. Letting him become something that could be used against her was a mistake she fears she might soon regret.
When she steps off the shuttle, the first thing that hits her is the thickness of the air. She knows it's impossible for the ashes from Palaven to be felt in the atmosphere of this moon, but that's how it feels. A pungent scent of ozone and scorched metal is everywhere and Shepard nearly gags on it. It takes her a while to realise that it's the smell of burning turian bodies.
The short talk with General Corinthus is just more bad news. As if she wasn't depressed already, she now also has to face the knowledge that she's asking these people to give up their precious, decimated fleet when they desperately need it. How can she ask this of anyone? True, the Hierarchy hasn't been especially gracious towards humanity, but that doesn't excuse condemning all turians to death at the hands of the Reapers. Without their fleet, they don't stand a chance. She can't ask them for this. It's just…
She feels so helpless.
How do you fight an enemy that can use your own dead against you? It's so deviously efficient in the worst way possible, and it makes her stomach turn. The Reapers barely even have to engage in the fighting planetside — all they have to do is turn casualties into manpower, sit back, and watch the organics tear each other apart.
This enemy is beyond her, beyond anyone. There's no winning against the Reapers, the only thing anyone can do is stand their ground and fight. She's willing to take up that fight, but how many will follow her? How can she hope to inspire anyone to take up this pointless struggle? How can she inspire people to fight when the next enemy soldier might be the corpse of their brother or their friend? How is she supposed to tell people to fight that?
Of all the things the Reapers have done so far, this might just be the one that angers Shepard the most. She hates fighting against those things, hates that she can still somewhat recognise their features, sometimes.
Cannibals, made of what once might have been krogan. Husks, once human and now closer to mindless zombies. Marauders, grotesquely disfigured turian bodies. All dead people who weren't even allowed to rest. Twisted almost beyond recognition by the Reapers to turn against their own.
The human in her despises this desecration of the dead. The tactician in her reluctantly admires this practice as both a disgustingly effective scare tactic and efficient use of what the Reapers probably see as an expendable resource. It's a frustrating combination of emotions that she has trouble reconciling inside her heart.
She turns that frustration into anger, and the anger into pure adrenaline. Fighting comes easily to her — she knows this, it's familiar. It's easy to fall back on her squadmates when she's in the heat of battle again; easy to ignore all her doubts and fears, easy to just throw herself into the fight. The flashes of Liara's biotics somewhere off in the distance are confirmation that her friend's still somewhere relatively nearby, and Vega provides supporting fire while Shepard picks off the farther targets. When her sniper rifle overheats, she switches to a pistol instead of wasting any time on waiting. It's no difference: in fact, she can direct more of her rage in bullet form at the enemies.
She kills the first few with little thought. The first Marauder falls to a single shot from her sniper rifle after being lifted off the ground by Liara's biotics, the second — to a full round of perfectly aimed headshots after Shepard had already switched to a handgun. The next one is rended apart by Vega's assault rifle before she even has the chance to pull the trigger.
Then the husks come. And it becomes just a tiny bit more difficult to distance herself from it, to ignore that those are people, her people — probably people she personally failed to save in time.
She kills them, of course. She can't afford to hesitate. If she hesitated now, it might mean death. Human, turian, krogan, in the end it doesn't matter. They're not people anymore. She shouldn't care. It shouldn't affect her this much. It shouldn't matter that she's killing humans who already died once before, it shouldn't matter that—
She's not like them. It was different with her. It's not… It's different.
She throws herself into the fight again, but it's slightly more difficult now that there are humans in the mix. The raw pain of leaving Earth to the Reapers is still a fresh wound that these husks tear open with their claws until it bleeds all over her heart.
Another Marauder falls to her omniblade, and scathing hot blood shoots at her from the severed artery, painting her gauntlets a sickly off-blue colour.
She points her gun at the next enemy, but instead of pulling the trigger, she freezes still.
Blue eyes and silvery grey plates.
The Marauder charges at her and Shepard's brought back in time. She's on Virmire, and Wrex is pointing his shotgun at her. Her pistol is aimed directly at his head, safety off and finger on the trigger guard. She can smell the heavy, humid air hanging around her, all saltwater and blood, and she can still feel the way her undersuit sticks to her body in the heat, and the way her blood is pumping in her veins.
Suddenly, in a tiny burst of clarity, she remembers Garrus saying he thought Virmire was beautiful. The memory jumps out at her, a single moment she completely forgot among a million others. Garrus thought Virmire was beautiful. He told her, on one of those nights when neither of them could sleep, both too wound up from reliving their respective near misses with death to voluntarily close their eyes, that of all the places they'd seen, he'd liked Virmire the most. And then, of course, immediately backtracked to clarify he meant before the bomb went off. She remembers laughing at that.
She doesn't know why the memory comes to her now. She misses those late night talks with Garrus. For a long time, he was the only person she trusted on the Cerberus-controlled ship. They talked about a lot of things. Mostly reminiscing about "the old times" — barely two years earlier for him, and just yesterday for her. Somehow, those days chasing after Saren and the geth seemed like a fond memory. But it had not been all nice. Somewhere along the way, her view became coloured by nostalgia and fondness, and she forgot Virmire had not been the nice memory of lush forests and serene beachfronts that it seemed later on.
Would she be able to kill a friend? Shepard keeps asking herself that. If it was necessary, if it was what the mission called for, if there was no other choice, would she have pulled the trigger on one of her own?
Would she be able to take the life of someone she held dear?
She didn't kill Wrex on Virmire. In the end, everything worked out for the best, and she didn't have to put down a friend.
But now she's pointing her gun at this blue-eyed Marauder, finger resting on the trigger guard, and she can't will herself to pull the trigger.
It's not him. It's not him.
Even if it's him, it's not him anymore.
Shepard has never once hesitated to shoot. She's lived her life with conviction, and put her all behind every choice she made. She's never understood what people meant when they said they felt paralysed by indecision. She always thought it was just a figure of speech, just a colourful metaphor to add dramaticism to a situation.
But Shepard is paralysed by indecision now, and it's not just a figure of speech. She can't move a muscle, and it's every bit as terrifying as the situation itself. Her heart is pounding in her chest, but her body refuses to move even as she screams at it to. She has the enemy in her sights, she should be able to just pull the trigger, but something is stopping her no matter how much her brain urges her to do it.
He's dead. The thing charging at her is not a person anymore. It's not him.
Shepard feels tears fill her eyes and tells herself it's because of the ash from the burning planet above them and the sharp smell of scorched turian bodies.
She's got the target in her sights. Her grip on her pistol is steady. Her hands aren't shaking. It's an easy shot. It's a big enemy moving towards her in a straight line, the easiest target she could possibly ask for. The creature snarls and stumbles, but doesn't swerve or stray. What was once the turian's mandibles flop around, held only by a thin strip of flesh. Silvery grey plates glisten in the light reflected off of Palaven's surface.
As the first shot rings out in the air, the Marauder stumbles, wounded leg no longer supporting its weight. The following series of bullets rends its body apart even more than the Reapers' modifications did. Blue blood shoots out of each wound at an unnaturally high pressure until the creature eventually falls dead.
Shepard is breathing heavily, chest heaving, finger still on the trigger.
She didn't fire a single shot.
Vega runs up to her, assault rifle gripped tightly in one hand as he uses the other to reach into his bandolier for more ammo.
"Shepard?" He's visibly concerned — definitely doesn't understand why the Commander didn't shoot the Reaper soldier she had very clearly in her sights.
Shepard doesn't listen. She can't force herself to be rational, not when she still sees those sky blue eyes whenever she closes hers. She feels like Vega is going to judge her for it, but she can't… She falls to her knees and desperately runs her hands all over the fallen Marauder's body.
The turian this once was no longer looks like himself, and there's very little identifiable characteristics left after the Reapers desecrated the body and turned it into this creature, but Shepard knows what she's looking for.
Her fingers shake as she tears off remains of clothing, and she can't will them to be still. She needs to see— Turian colony markings are specifically designed to help identify the dead on a battlefield, so even if the soldier was badly disfigured or maimed, there should still be something… She needs to know. The colour. She needs to see the colour, needs to—
Shepard feels weak when she finally finds a sliver of this turian's colony markings, on what had once been a mandible.
Blue.
She almost throws up.
"Shepard." Vega's voice right next to her is more urgent now.
It's not the same— She can't fully discern the features, not even from this close up, but it's a paler, lighter blue than the one she's hoping not to see, and she tells herself that this matters, that maybe this means something. It's different.
She stares into the empty, hazy blue eyes of the thing James killed. Not many turians have blue eyes. In fact, it's about as common as red hair is for humans. A similar defining characteristic that, she now realises, could be used to identify her if the tables were turned.
The thought makes her heart turn into solid stone and drop right into her stomach. She's not sure who it is she's imagining frantically trying to identify a red-haired husk the same way she's trying to recognise this blue-eyed Marauder, but she knows it makes her feel weak.
"It's not him," she whispers. When she receives no response, she looks up at Vega, who has been standing guard while she went through her breakdown. "Tell me it's not him!"
"I…" He hesitates, and Shepard can clearly see the complete confusion and helplessness on his face. He has no idea what she's talking about. "You knew this turian?"
"I don't—" Shepard shakes her head sharply. "I don't know, I…" She carefully swipes her armor-clad hand over the dead Marauder's face. She wants to close his eyes, give him at least a semblance of the rest the Reapers took away, but she quickly realises that his eyelids have been removed.
The eyes stare back at her, hazy and dead and as blue as the sky. They will never stop staring at her.
"I don't know," she whispers.
She should know, right? She should be able to tell. No matter what they did to him, no matter what they turned him into, she should be able to recognise the only fucking person she's ever loved—
"Shepard." This time it's not just Vega trying to get her attention — it's Liara, and she grasps her shoulder so tightly it snaps her out her spiral. Shepard looks up, and she's sure she must look completely desperate, because Liara just softly shakes her head. "It's not him."
"How do you know—"
"I don't." It's brutally honest, yes, but it's probably the only thing she can get in terms of a consolation here. "But I didn't know if you made it off Earth, and you're right here. So…" Liara looks up, towards Palaven burning in the sky. She frowns, and her next words come out without any of the confidence she was projecting before. "I… choose to believe that Garrus made it out too."
Shepard feels her hands shake as she holds onto the dead turian's body in her lap. She wants to give him more than he's been given, wants to return at least some of the dignity stolen by the Reapers. She doesn't know this turian. What can she do for him? He must have had someone who loved him too, must have had a family and friends… He had people who should be allowed to mourn him instead of having to face his remains in battle.
She hates that the Reapers don't play by the rules, she hates that they don't care what's moral or ethical and only see efficiency and results. They don't see individuals in the people they slaughter; they operate on millions and billions, on numbers and data, and this turian she never even met deserves more than to be left there somewhere on the fields of this moon, dead and changed and forgotten, and it's not fucking fair.
And Shepard doesn't know how to deal with that.
"I keep seeing him when I fall asleep," she confesses to Garrus one night.
She's woken up from yet another nightmare to find him lying beside her, his hand gently stroking her back, already soothing the pain even before she shared it with him. She has no idea if she woke him up or if he simply had not fallen asleep yet, but he's right there beside her. Blue eyes gentle but attentive.
"Keep seeing who?" he asks softly. It's not an unfounded question — there is a lot of people she keeps seeing when she falls asleep. People she lost, people she didn't manage to save, people she let down. She's seeing strangers now, too. That's new.
"I don't know," she whispers. "A dead turian soldier from Menae. I... don't even know anything about him. Not even his name."
She shivers, and instinctively curls up. She can't bear the heavy weight of Garrus's concerned gaze on her, so she also rolls over so she's not facing him anymore.
After a moment of silence, she feels him move behind her, before he pulls the covers over her. His hand lingers there, on her shoulder, even after he makes sure she's carefully covered up.
Shepard slowly lets out her breath. There's something so soft and gentle in that touch, something that — even if they're not face-to-face right now — makes her all the more aware of her connection to him. Garrus might not understand what she's going through, but he always does his best to support her through it. Even now, pulling the covers over her after he noticed her shivering… It's in tiny moments like this that she sees the full strength of his devotion. He's got her back, even in the seemingly insignificant little things. He's always got her back.
"…I thought it was you."
She's staring straight ahead. It's easier to let those words out when she doesn't have to look him in the eye, when she doesn't have to see his reaction. Easier to just release them into the darkness in front of her.
"I know we said the worst thing about the galaxy going to hell would have been never seeing each other again, but that's not true." Her eyelids feel heavy. Her words feel heavy. Everything is so damn heavy and she's so tired. Too tired to even cry. "That's not true. The worst thing…"
She doesn't finish. She's not sure she even had an ending in mind for that line of thought.
Garrus, once again, doesn't say anything. She can feel him silently press his forehead to the back of her head, but he doesn't speak a single word. His hand finds hers under the sheets and she instinctively opens up and lets him intertwine his fingers with hers.
Shepard lets out a small, shaky breath once she squeezes his hand clasped tightly in hers and then feels him squeeze back. He's still here. No matter what horrors might haunt her in her dreams, he's right there when she wakes up. To comfort and to hold, he's right by her side.
She can't even imagine falling asleep without him there to soothe the nightmares when they inevitably come anymore. She couldn't do this without him.
She can't lose him. She doesn't know what she'd do, doesn't know how she would handle it. She also knows that it has never been as real a possibility as it is now. With how things are going, everyone is losing what they love most.
And, for her, that's…
Shepard feels a heavy weight in her throat and quickly forces herself to swallow it.
She can't even think it.
"I don't want you to become one of those things," she whispers.
A probably childish thing to say: she's stating the obvious more than anything. It's hardly an original thought, hardly a fear unique to her and the situation she's in. Everyone fears this. Everyone has someone they're not willing to lose and no one wants to see their loved ones turned into a mindless mass of flesh and cybernetics fighting for the enemy. It's really not an original fear to have, especially when there are so many other things she should be driving herself crazy over.
But it haunts her. It haunts her every time she has to shoot one of them. She thinks of the person this had been, of the life they'd led and the people they'd loved before the Reapers tore it all away. The turian ones are the worst, both the Marauders and the stitched-up amalgamations of turian and krogan. She hates facing them. It brings her back to that terrifying moment, it makes her deepest fears resurface, makes her worry about when she'll hesitate next.
"I… know," Garrus says hesitantly. His voice sounds somewhere right next to her ear, a soft whisper that barely parts her hair. She can feel his arms close around her waist and pull her tighter into his embrace. "I know."
He makes no promises. He doesn't say what she wants — or perhaps needs — him to say, doesn't try to give her false hope with assurances of something he can't provide.
There is a part of her, the part that's all logic and tactics and efficiency, that keeps dragging the rest of her along with it as it revisits that moment on Menae. An almost insignificant blink in her composure, it has had virtually no impact on that mission — or on anything else other than her rapidly dwindling sanity. Said sanity is fractured enough as is, but this memory chips away at it even more. Because that pesky little logical part of her just can't seem to let go of the moment she hesitated to shoot. Not even hesitated, really — some part of her had actually refused to pull that trigger. Did that make her a better person or a worse one? And was the morality of her actions even relevant to someone in Shepard's position? Hesitating to kill an enemy, no matter who they might have once been, no matter the moral and ethical implications, can only lead to disaster.
It wasn't even him.
Not for the first time (though she genuinely wishes it was the first time), Shepard wonders if that would have mattered. Had it really been him, would that have changed the way she continued to torment herself for that moment of hesitation? Or would the realisation of her fears have eased the guilt? The memory would have continued to haunt her just like it's doing now, that's for certain, but for different reasons. The guilt and reluctance tormenting her now would likely be grief and rage.
"Tell me everything's gonna be okay." She stares at the ceiling. The words, even though she tried her best to make them sound genuine, just come out flat and too soft to carry any actual strength behind them. It sounds every bit like the empty phrase she knows it to be.
"Everything's gonna be okay."
Garrus sounds just as tired as her, if not even more. The way his dual voice overlays, normally a comfort and one of the few constants in the uncontrollable whirlwind of her life, just sounds odd now. He doesn't believe a single word of that platitude she asked him for.
She closes her eyes.
"You think that?"
"No." She's not looking at him, but she can imagine that barely noticeable little shake of his head, can almost see the single twitch of his nose and the way he wouldn't break eye contact, with perfect clarity.
"Tell me you won't leave me."
Another request — an even more selfish one this time. She doesn't like who she's becoming because of that one moment of weakness. She doesn't like how much it affected her.
"Well, I'm not leaving." For the first time tonight, she gets the impression that Garrus is using his own words. No longer saying what she asks him to say, no longer just playing along for her comfort.
After admiring the dull metalwork of the Normandy's ceiling for a few seconds longer, Shepard just rolls over to lie on her side and face him.
Garrus looks tired. Exhausted, really — not the type of exhaustion that can be erased by something as mundane as a good night's sleep. There's a heavy darkness in his eyes, one she knows all too intimately from every time she looks into a mirror.
Talons play with loose strands of hair as he gently tucks them behind her ear. His hand lingers there, rough hide caressing her cheek in a way that's so intimately familiar that she somehow feels some of her muscles actually relax under his touch.
"I love you," she whispers. Not expecting an answer, not trying to prove anything, not presenting an explanation for her mistakes. She loves him, and for all the ways it comes as a liability, she's not denying it. Shepard's never been one to deny the facts when they're this clear.
She froze up on Menae because she loves Garrus. It's not an explanation and it is definitely not an excuse, but it is the reason. For all she knows, her love for him might hurt her again — even worse yet, it might hinder her rational decisionmaking again, threaten the mission again, and...
She can't allow that. She shouldn't allow that.
When Garrus leans in to first press his mouth plates to her forehead, then rest their heads together, Shepard closes her eyes. His hands grasp either side of her face, thumbs tracing gentle circles along her jawline and cheekbones, and she tries to lose herself in the sensation. Imagines that the pads of his fingers moving across her cheeks and his crest resting against her forehead are the only tethers she has to the real world. She doesn't need to exist beyond the soft affection he's hesitantly offering in silence.
As far as anchors go, Garrus makes for a really good one. Heavy, solid, and steady, he presents a stability few other things in Shepard's life could. As if made for grounding her, the man's practically built to be a weighted blanket. Just the physical weight of him resting on top of her is enough to connect her to reality when she starts to drift further away from the tether of her body. He will just awkwardly rest his head on her chest and listen to her heartbeat, sometimes curl up around her with his body pressed closely against hers, and every time, without fail, it brings her down from her spiral. She has no idea how he can always sense that she needs grounding when she doesn't say anything, but, ever the marksman, he's always right on target.
Shepard's always hated feeling vulnerable, always avoided leaving herself open and bare in front of somebody else, be it physically or emotionally. It's genuinely baffling, then, how easily that comes to her now. How easily she surrenders herself to Garrus's affection, how quick she is to close her eyes and let him hold her, how safe she feels despite being defenceless around another person. How right it feels to be gentle with him the way she's never been with anything else. What part of her looked at him and decided she was going to pin all her strength and willpower on the continued survival of this one person? It was a mistake.
Garrus has stopped stroking her cheek, his fingers now absently running through her hair, filed talons combing through the tangled parts and gently massaging her scalp. He remains as silent as before, the silence between them like yet another blanket, this one cutting her off from the soft background noise of reality — the quiet bubbling of her fish tank's water filtration system, the low hum of the Normandy's engines, and the steady pattern of their breathing; hers just that one beat quicker than his but somehow still perfectly matched despite being different tempo.
It was a mistake. She shouldn't have put so much on him. She's become compromised. This is bad. No matter how much she tries to talk sense into herself, the fact remains that she's still here, Garrus is still lying right there beside her and playing with her hair, and she is not only letting him stay but enjoying it. Finding comfort in it.
She's a terrible person.
What if the next time she freezes up, James or someone else won't be there to save her in time? What if something does happen to Garrus? She's put too much of her will to fight solely on his well-being, and even though she's fully aware of every horrible aspect of that mistake, she has no idea how to pull back — and, quite honestly, no real intention to.
Which officially makes her the asshole. Taking all his affection and giving nothing in return other than the burden of a responsibility he'd never asked for. How selfish could she get, how self-centered, to decide for him what his importance in this war would be? He never asked to have all her hope pinned on him. He never asked to become her only tether. She made all those choices for him, and that's just an added layer of terribleness on top of the already terrible way her connection to him makes her a weaker leader and a less reliable soldier. So why does it feel right? Why does it feel right to have him in her arms, to hold him as if there's any hope or peace in this world, even though she's terrified she might lose them at any moment? Why is this...
Garrus doesn't say a word even as she starts to shake and eventually sob. All he does is just continue to gently stroke her back and only slightly pull her closer into his embrace. He tucks her head underneath his chin and hums something, or maybe just breathes, in a way that spreads soft vibrations across her body, soothing and comforting but not intruding.
He doesn't ask. She doesn't share. She doesn't need to anyway: what would he even say to make this alright? He's not going to lie to her. Shepard knows who she fell in love with: Garrus has never been an optimist, has never seen unrealistic hope beyond the one he found in her. He's not going to provide reassurance here — all he can offer is comfort and companionship.
A part of her — that selfish, terrible part that she hates and tries to ignore — wishes he could be more verbally supportive. But in the end she knows it wouldn't have changed anything. She would have just made him uncomfortable by forcing him to be something he was not, and it wouldn't have even mattered. The truth is, comfort and companionship are more than enough. Sometimes she's amazed she managed to get even that much. The steady familiarity of his presence either at her six on the battlefield or by her side in her bed is a damn comfort in its own right.
In fact, Shepard thinks to herself as he holds her, his embrace is the best anchor she could ask for.
She finds herself slowly drifting back into the sleep her nightmare interrupted, trying to focus solely on the steady, solid body wrapped around her and not on whatever memories her brain might dredge up from where she locked them away. Garrus breathes quietly, slowly. The motion itself is nearly imperceptible, any movement hidden deep beneath his plates. She tries to focus only on that one thing — the quiet sound of his breathing as he holds her. It's soft and steady, and quiet enough for her to have to really listen if she wants to hear it. Soon, it becomes the only thing she's aware of — and eventually even that fades away.
When she falls asleep, she dreams of silvery grey plates and sky blue eyes again, but this time the dream she has is a good one.